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N.B. even older news...submitted at 10:24pm on 3/13 This may seem out of left field, but reading Darnell Hunt’s “Screening the Los Angeles “riots”: Race, seeing, and resistance” made me think about The Cosby Show. Watching various documentaries and retrospectives on the LA riots, I remembered hearing that Tom Bradley, then-mayor of Los Angeles urged … Continue reading Airing Cosby While They Screened the LA riots

First, I would like to take a moment to thank you all for such an engaging quarter. I know that I can be on the quiet side, but I truly enjoyed class discussion and learned so much from everyone. For my final post, I had originally drafted a long post that tossed out an idea … Continue reading Final Thoughts on the Course and Coronavirus

Listening to Kristen talk about being a young adult in the aftermath of 9/11 made me think about my own experience. I had just started my senior year of high school, so I was certainly old enough to fully register what was happening, and can use that moment as a marker of “before and after”. … Continue reading 9/11 and Premediated Normalcy

I really enjoyed our conversation on Deleuze's "Postscript." While I've read the piece a few times before, what struck me reading it, perhaps due to our emphasis on economic history and neoliberalism, is how much of it is dedicated to describing the technologies, media, and mechanisms through which the logic of individualism in all areas … Continue reading cumulative control societies

I’ve been thinking about Edouard Glissant’s theory about oppressed peoples’ “right to opacity”, black performance as commodity, and how these points are in conversation with Aria Dean’s piece about black social media. Dean writes: “One of the greatest tasks of blackness as collective being has been to hold itself together in something like cohesion, to … Continue reading Black Twitter and Opacity

Reading different examples of Uber's (often-awful) data practices made me think about the way Uber still presents itself to users as something of a branded experience rather than a utility or service, which to me paradoxically makes the experience less enjoyable and dehumanized (despite relying on it so often.) When I'm paired with a driver, … Continue reading Uber, Airbnb, and “Experiences”

NB: old news Aveline didn’t need the “lady” costume to seduce men. That was my first thought while reading Soraya Murray’s chapter about Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation. Murray says that “Aveline’s multiple identifications as woman and Afro-French American, and again as what would then be called a product of ‘miscegenation’, present a case in which … Continue reading Thoughts on Aveline and World-Building

I’ve read Maus a number of times, but never thought to read more from Art Spiegelman. I was not expecting his next project to be a meticulously created 9/11 comic. He begins by explaining in an introductory essay why he decided to return to comics, over a decade after Maus was published in full. Mostly … Continue reading following spiegelman’s fragments, some fragments on spiegelman

I'm always surprised when I read about the amount of data Amazon (and Facebook) are able to track about us. Especially in the most recent election cycle, in which there are candidates who express willingness to regulate these tech giants, I wonder about the extent to which firms could draw on that data to sway … Continue reading Amazon and Political Control

This post started as a comment on another user's post and kind of turned into its own thing. I would be interested to see if there’s a generational divide w/r/t the form of false news spread on the internet. In the 1990’s contemporary internet users spread chain e-mails warning readers of HIV needles hidden in … Continue reading The Evolution of Fake News in the Online Ecosystem